Summary Of Dorian Gray's Dichotomy

In Chapter 1, Basil and Lord Henry manifest the dichotomy between Heaven and Hell, alluding to a future break of the harmony and duality of the novel’s moral conscience personified in Dorian Gray.
Basil idolizes Dorian as an entity of “simple nature,” creating a foundation of moral balance for the novel, representing Dorian as a Greek ideal (Wilde 14).
Lord Henry cements his archetype as the Devil as his influence is “bad,” (14) foreboding Henry controlling Dorian with the influences that “give him [Dorian’s] one’s own soul,” (17).

The end of Chapter 2 marks the dawn of Henry’s manipulative allure to youth, puncturing the balance between Basil and Henry’s roles, sowing the seeds of Hedonism in Dorian’s moral compass.
Wilde alludes to music as Henry hits a “secret chord” for Dorian (18) and sparks a Faustian sacrifice, selling his soul to

be under the influence of Lord Henry (the Devil) allowing him to “dominate” his thoughts (36).
From the “Hellenic ideal” (18) to “youth” being the only desire in the world (23), Henry’s influence separates Dorian’s identities, between him and the portrait, creating a subtle mayhem over who the “real Dorian” (29) and where his true identity belongs.
Dorian seeks “to search for beauty” (48) and believes that this is the “meaning of life” epitomizes his corrupt obsession over an artistic ideal, implementing Henry’s teachings of the “dark side” of the force of morality.
After the events of Sibyl’s suicide, Dorian Gray’s abhorrence and objectification of Sibyl Vane marks the first side effects of Lord Henry’s virus drifting Dorian away from the concept of purity for a facade of immortality in the form of appearance, slowly slumping himself onto a slippery slope of sin.
Wilde Juxtaposes Dorian’s “mad love” (58) of Sibyl with the belief that she is a “waste of tears” (103), intending to reveal his obsession with material beauty with the belief that Sibyl was simply a representation of Shakespeare’s art and “Greek Tragedy” (100), ultimately revealing Dorian’s lack of empathy and full embrace of Henry’s paradoxical philosophy.
Wilde claims that art has the ability to capture emotions, but when Dorian’s portrait is “altered,” (95) his emotions and soul are literally captured by the art, revealing a clear divergence of the “innocent” Dorian and the true Dorian into two separate entities as the influence of Lord Henry continues to divide them.
The passage of 18 years in Chapter 11 reveals an exponential decay and distortion of Dorian without Wilde using any words, illuminating the belief of an exponential vice masked by a false sense of control, attempting to preserve his image, developing the novel into a state of decaying perplexity within Dorian.
Dorian continues to be “enamored by his own beauty” (128) aiming to represent the “true object of life” (132), an ideal art form to shine light and falsely justify his conscience blackened by vice and sin.
Even though Dorian seems to be pure and innocent, he is in constant fear, acting as if he has killed his past, yet hates to be away from the portrait that is “part of his life” (141) revealing a part of Dorian that he has not fully transformed into the slave of Lord Henry and Hell with a subconscious glimmer of morality.
In Chapter 13, Dorian’s murder of Basil is the reaction to his true identity being embodied through the portrait, killing off any potential path up by digging himself down into an abyss of moral depravity.
Basil even causes Dorian to recognize the portrait has “destroyed him,” asking him to “pray,” emphasizing Wilde’s archetype of Heaven, only to be destroyed by Dorian’s moral aimlessness, representing the folly in trying to turn Dorian back as he has lost any hope of harmony (157).

By having Basil be “gone” physically and covering the portrait, Dorian evades the truth of his reality blinded by material pleasures, believing he has been “saved from ruin,” even though Basil was trying to save him, plunging further into Lord Henry’s grasp (174)
When Dorian Gray visits the Opium Den in Chapter 16, his past overwhelms him and creates an existential crisis developing a sense of Basil’s message of purity haunting him and a potential turning point on Dorian’s road to the immortality of his aesthetic..
But by entering an Opium Den, Dorian symbolizes the depths and darkness of his inner thoughts, ‘to escape from himself” after seeing people of his past that remind him of his cruelty; similar to opium, his craving for the ideal aesthetic cannot be fulfilled any more, having withdrawal symptoms of who he, through the portrait, truly is

(188).
His past continues to catch up to him and the “black cave of time” fuels this existential crisis to cause him to question his actions, realizing that the reason for his anxiety and distress is the constant avoidance of his past, maturing his madness that continues through time getting bigger than his metaphorical opium can control, looking back up to gain back sanity, only to find himself in purgatory (200).

Dorian’s suicide in Chapter 20 is truly a rebirth of his conscience, continuing his true identity through the portrait, bringing a morbid harmony back to the novel, back to its original pure entity, essentially a cycle of reincarnation, with Dorian’s soul being idolized by the painting for its purity after death, just like Basil wanted.
Before his suicide, he attempts to escape the truth of his past by aiming to remove the corruption of the portrait, so he could be “at peace” (223), representing a true reach for the heavens as the sands of Satan continue to swallow him to his eventual doom, ultimately realizing his wrongdoings.
But by killing the “demons” of his soul, he leaves his body in the state of purgatory and brings his soul back to the duality of “heaven and hell within [him]” (157), with the “loathsome...visage” (224) symbolizing the moral depravity that developed through the novel with any trace of Lord Henry erased, while his true aesthetic lives on.